Broken Regiment
For All Nails #138A: Broken Regiment by President Chester A. Arthur ---- :Prescott's Point, Angel Island, California FN1 :1 June 1949 ,,,,the Jap flak tore through the big airmobile's windscreen like a fist through paper. Arango's chest exploded like pink mist as glass slashed through the building and Walker felt a blow like a punch to his side. He grabbed the stick in front of him, slick with his pilot's lifeblood, the sight of Niigata in flames below and the screams of his aircrew behind him blended into a symphony of pain-" Walker Bush FN2 felt a hand on his shoulder and nearly tore the man's arm off. "Shit!" He spun around. "Dan...don't do that again...wouldn't be prudent." He straightened his uniform. It didn't do for the town's new sheriff to fight with his chief deputy in the middle of his office just as the tourist season was getting full-bodied. There was a reason he'd used his father's name to the town's mayor, a reason he'd invoked his family for the first time since he'd gone off to the Air Corps camp in Santa Fe. If he failed here, it was back to the big house in Jefferson City, or his father's in the Federal District, an emptiness that felt louder than an artillery shell's scream. Daniel Ortega pulled his left hand back. He'd left his right hand somewhere on the banks of the Amur, along with the Japanese soldier who'd shot it off when the Mexicans and Siberians first took Manchuria. "Sorry, jefe." Resentment flashed briefly in his eyes at the word, deliberately obsequious. When Bush had become sheriff six months earlier, he'd taken Ortega into his office and asked him if he resented losing the sheriff's job. Resent? I spend six years pulling drunk sailors out of bars, keeping the sons of federal bureaucrats from going blind on methanol, and not punching in the face of punks who call me "Hook" and the job goes to a flyboy from Jefferson City whose father is a college buddy of Silva's cousin? No, why on Earth would I resent that? "Juarez was on the radio, he says they found that girl the fumcrano FN3 reported missing last night, out on Hermión where the man said." Ortega paused. "He sounded very . . . upset." "That's . . . not good." Vincent Juarez had been a leatherneck before a shell fragment had taken his eye three years before. The Marine island-hopping campaign didn't make for soft men. Bush and Juarez had once pulled a high North American tourist with a knife off a whore he'd been working on for about half an hour. Bush had smashed the man, an ex-journalist named Thompson, over the top of the head and thrown him in the back of the locomobile before throwing up on the newly-paved road outside. Juarez had helped his boss back into the loke, driven them both back, and worked Thompson over until the bastard was asking to confess. Bush sighed and threw down his pen. "Let's go." The air outside the station was what Bush had come to expect from the tourist town founded by his great-great uncle; a mix of loke exhaust, fried-banana and popcorn stands, human sweat, and finally the sand and sea, the two great constants of his life the last few years. The Walker Bush of 1943 was a man he could barely recognize; twenty years old and fresh out of Hamilton, so damn Anglo he could barely speak Spanish and hadn't seen anyone darker than a light bronze outside of his maid and butler. Basic training had killed that man, and crashing his burning bomber into the sea and spending two nights watching the sharks slowly pick off his aircrew before the Greene found him, well, that had buried him. Ortega weaved the loke through the crowd on the streets; the usual even mix of cherry-red tourists from Jefferson and Mexico and the north, "locals" from as far away as Durango and Guadalajara, and grey-clad soldiers and sailors in blue from the base at the southern tip of the island. One of the young soldiers caught his eye; he'd been about that age when he'd first gone off to war. Madre de Dios, let these boys stay home with their mothers and girlfriends. He turned to his boss to share the sentiment and saw the man lost in thought, as usual. Damn it!, he cursed and sped up a little. In a fight, in an interrogation, in an active investigation, Bush was good for a new fish. But let him sit without a job to do for ten minutes, especially around Mexicanos, and there he goes. It had never occured to Bush that being the son of a monied Jefferson family, that being Anglo back to the Rocky Mountain War, that getting into the Air Corps thanks to his father's contacts, would pose a problem for relating to others. Not until his bunkmates had been an impoverished Hispano from Alaska, an ex-slave from Chiapas, and a full-blooded Maya from a town in Yucatan that had never seen a loke. A great way to learn about class. Not to mention race . . . And here he was, the Anglo sheriff with an all-Mexicano deputy force, in a town that went from 5,000 fishermen and shopkeepers to 30,000 tourists in the summer, though hopefully more now that the fighting had stopped. FN4 Maybe someday he'd manage to talk to them outside of work. The big loke headed its way down a military road that hadn't been repaired since the day the asphalt was laid down in 1942, and then up over a sand dune to Benito Hermión Beach, which hadn't had more than a few (legal) swimmers since the war began. That's what had made it so very attractive to the marihuana users over the years; mostly wounded veterans and high-school and college girls missing their men at war. Juarez was standing at the top of the next dune. The blood on his hands wasn't surprising; his usually dark face flushed white was not. "Sheriff! Dan! Over here!" He waved vigorously, and both men came running. Bush stopped at the head of the dune and looked down. The girl was on the sand. The sun was high overhead, shading sharp colors onto the beach below. The water was blue. The sand was white. And the body was red. And pink. And black. A crab scuttled past a hand, a seagull looked up from investigating a broken skull, something red in its beak. "This was no boating accident . . ." ---- Forward to FAN #138B (2 June 1949): The Darkest Colors. Return to For All Nails. Category:Walker Bush